Share this:

Like this:

There’s actually a lot one could say about this (And it’s not all just some spurious correlation). Alas, I’ve already done far too much blogging lately. I originally found this on FB and I’m not totally sold on “happyplace.com” but this looks about right:

The ultimate test case of whether it is possible to lie and get away with it will be the outcome in Ohio, where Romney is running ads in open disregard of the truth.

Over the past two weeks, with Ohio once again a key battleground, the Romney campaign has falsely alleged in speeches and in television commercials that Chrysler plans to shift Jeep manufacturing and jobs from the United State to China.

“I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China,” Romney told a rally in Defiance, Ohio on Oct. 25. His commercial declares:

Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China. Mitt Romney will fight for every American job.

If Romney wins Ohio, every campaign in future elections is going to give much more serious consideration to lying and to open defiance of media rebuttals as a legitimate campaign expedient.

Don’t know that this particular shameful lie worked, but on the whole I think it is fair to say that the Romney campaign’s utter disregard for the truth was definitely more successful than not. Sad for democracy.

Share this:

Like this:

Fun behind-the-scenes account of the campaign very much centered on the first debate and how the candidates prepared for it. This was my favorite snippet:

Mr. Obama showed no interest in watching the Republican debates. But his aides studied them closely, and concluded that Mr. Romney was a powerful debater, hard to intimidate and fast to throw out assertions that would later prove wrong or exaggerated. At one debate, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas criticized Mr. Romney for having praised Arne Duncan, the education secretary, days earlier. Mr. Romney flatly denied it, leaving Mr. Perry speechless.

At the White House, Mr. Obama’s communications director, Dan Pfeiffer, took note of that moment, intending to mention it to Mr. Obama. He would later fault himself for failing to fully understand “the magnitude of the challenge” Mr. Romney’s debate style presented.

Share this:

Like this:

Loved this Time story about all the heavy duty quantitative analysis that went into the Obama campaign. A couple of the most interesting snippets:

The strategists fashioned tests for specific demographic groups, trying out message scripts that they could then apply. They tested how much better a call from a local volunteer would do than a call from a volunteer from a non–swing state like California. As Messina had promised, assumptions were rarely left in place without numbers to back them up.

We got a fair number of Obama calls. In all honesty, I saw this is a mark of inefficiency as their models should have had Kim and I down as certain Obama voters who needed no additional persuasion. Anyway, all the calls came from “unknown number” in our area code– 919. Since even my cell phone comes up “unknown number” I pretty much answer any call that caller ID shows is 919. In one conversation, I learned the caller was calling from South Carolina, yet the system obviously routes the call to make it look local. Smart!! I would’ve never picked up from an unfamiliar area code.

This too:

Data helped drive the campaign’s ad buying too. Rather than rely on outside media consultants to decide where ads should run, Messina based his purchases on the massive internal data sets. “We were able to put our target voters through some really complicated modeling, to say, O.K., if Miami-Dade women under 35 are the targets, [here is] how to reach them,” said one official. As a result, the campaign bought ads to air during unconventional programming, like Sons of Anarchy, The Walking Dead and Don’t Trust the B—- in Apt. 23, skirting the traditional route of buying ads next to local news programming. How much more efficient was the Obama campaign of 2012 than 2008 at ad buying? Chicago has a number for that: “On TV we were able to buy 14% more efficiently … to make sure we were talking to our persuadable voters,” the same official said.

The numbers also led the campaign to escort their man down roads not usually taken in the late stages of a presidential campaign. In August, Obama decided to answer questions on the social news website Reddit, which many of the President’s senior aides did not know about. “Why did we put Barack Obama on Reddit?” an official asked rhetorically. “Because a whole bunch of our turnout targets were on Reddit.”

That data-driven decisionmaking played a huge role in creating a second term for the 44th President and will be one of the more closely studied elements of the 2012 cycle. It’s another sign that the role of the campaign pros in Washington who make decisions on hunches and experience is rapidly dwindling, being replaced by the work of quants and computer coders who can crack massive data sets for insight. As one official put it, the time of “guys sitting in a back room smoking cigars, saying ‘We always buy 60 Minutes’” is over. In politics, the era of big data has arrived.

I guess this means I fast-forwarded right by some Obama ads during Walking Dead. Anyway, I find this ad buying strategy fascinating.

Share this:

Like this:

Via Planet Money, this charts the birth ratio and ratio of elderly vs. working adults for a variety of nations over the course of the next 50 years or so. Our ratio of elderly to adults is scheduled to rise a lot soon, but then stabilize. Thanks in part to our higher birth ratios than places like Germany, France, and Japan. Really interesting and fun to play around with. Here’s a still below, but click through and give it a try: